Phoenix Mars: NASA mission ends

November 11, 2008|Posted by Cindy Jones-Hulfachor at 12:30 PM

After five months of digging, scooping, baking, sniffing and tasting. Phoenix has gone silent and is almost certainly dead, NASA says. Phoenix's main goals were to search for environments suitable for microbial life and research history of water on the planet.

Phoenix had a remarkable mission

It discovered two types of ice deposits, observed snow descending from Martian clouds, provided a record of weather during the length of the mission along with all types of data like temperatures, pressure, humidity and wind.

These images taken on the 21st and 25th day of the mission show ice formation and evaporation. On the left you can see ice clumps in the lower lefthand corner of the image, by the 25th day they had disappeared. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University Read more about the mission.